Modern hospitals intake and discharge hundreds of patients in individual facilities every day. When patients are nearing the completion of their treatment plan, they begin a discharge process which often requires the coordination and communication of multiple departments in the hospital. In many situations, the patient must be transported to various areas of the hospital, multiple individuals must visit the patient, and sometimes the patient must meet with multiple physicians located in different hospital units or facilities. Accomplishing these tasks requires frequent and constant exchange of data and information throughout the hospital and between multiple hospitals.
Traditional communication techniques for event detection and communication during the discharge process are based upon outdated communication technologies, resulting in overloaded systems that are slow, error-prone, and do not provide facility-wide communication using a centralized system. Indeed, traditional techniques usually rely upon multiple disparate systems, which may not integrate and exchange information. Some traditional techniques involve manual reporting of an event and/or manual requests for transportation, usually through phone calls between individuals in the facility. At the scale of modern hospital operations, traditional systems usually result in overloaded telephone lines, missed requests.
In view of the technical deficiencies of current systems discussed above, there is a need for improved systems and methods centralized real-time event detection and communication.